Just looking for people’s thoughts on how things might be different once players are able to play the TCG in person again…
Perhaps things were already changing after I stopped playing the TCG in early 2017, but for example, I remember loving to bling out my competitive decks and so did my friends… full decks of FA Virizions, Genesects, Lysanders, Seismitoads, fancy RH versions of hypno lasers, etc. Winning a match from a well executed move was always a great feeling, but it felt even better when you were dropping down your FA on the table to seal the deal.
I LOVED opening up booster boxes just to get a surplus of cards for deck building, binder collecting and trading at TCG events. Even though playing the game was my main focus, there were still cards I loved buying boxes for just to chase. I think the golden ultra ball out of Plasma Freeze is the card that stands out the most to me. I would buy PF like CRAZY, and one day one of my friends said he would go in half with me on a box. Of course, he pulled the ultra ball out of one of HIS packs. But all he wanted was to trade a bunch of trainers and EXs (of comparable value of course) to help him make better decks.
I can tell you during this time I never once thought about grading any of my cards. Not that golden ultra ball that took so long to pull, not any FA and secret rare zards I pulled from Flashfire - nothing. Anything that wasn’t viable in the game was more or less worthless to me. Sure, there were some cards I wanted just because the art work was cool or I maybe liked the Pokemon, but most of my stuff in binders I took to all the events in hopes of trading away for meta cards, or “upgraded” versions of ones I already had in decks to make the decks look cooler (I never managed to have a full playset of FA Ns 
)
So since returning to Pokémon this year as a collector and experiencing once again the enjoyment of pack opening, I am very much aware with how my outlook on things has changed. Where before I would pull a big “chase” card and just put it away in a binder, now I look at edge wear, centering, ask myself “does this card go in the graded stack, or is this an individual card I need to post up on eBay since I don’t think its worthy of a 10?”
Just wondering if there are other people here who have gone through changes in how they experience the Pokemon TCG, whether or not people think “bling” decks will become more or less a thing of the past with their being such a large focus on grading, and anything else related to this Pokemon boom and its effects on competitive play.